December 2024
Jenna Rindo
jennakayrindo@gmail.com
Bio Note: I worked for years as a pediatric RN at hospitals in Virginia, Florida and Wisconsin. I write to better understand the complications of the human body, mind and spirit. I've lived in Wisconsin over thirty years though without the mountains of my childhood state, Virginia, it may never feel like home. Here the winters are marathons and my coping strategies involve running, cross country skiing, or ice skating followed by baking—bread, muffins or cookies.


Dead of Winter

You are girl-child-woman, snow
shoeing. You are no survivor man,
parsing the starch from roots,
nibbling evergreen needles for vitamin C.
Eve’s first bite of forbidden tree
fruit leaves a sticky drip of wickedness
under your layers of thermal and silk.
You can’t muffle the marathon of
winter, its duration and depth. The sweet
taste of sap frozen sour in maples and box elders.

Here you consider the crepuscular
habit of deer. You notice the oval
beds of melted snow, the rapture of sleep.
You try to follow the maze of chambered
hoof prints in the layered frozen crust.
If you cut a cross section of the trophy
buck’s tooth, you could count the rings
under a microscope, much like aging a tree.
One layer of cementum formed for each
sin forgiven, each marathon completed.

You study the physiology of light
glaring off ice, yet even the slap of gale
force winds can’t shock you.
Measure the freeze in Fahrenheit.
Blue below zero thermometer
mercury pills and rolls over Lake Winnebago.
Ice-caked branches rattle their divinations.
Structured drifts cover everything:
litter, roadkill, the birds who failed
migration. Here there is no
witching up of water, nothing left liquid.
Originally published in Tampa Review


Cure for Winter's Grief

Let rain green the grass
spear the asparagus awake.
Let the waxy glow of daffodil
tapers thaw our bones.

Let the damsel sheep birth triplets
on the cruelest April night.
Then let her grind 
the burgundy after-birth.

Let the lambs wean from milk to weeds—
nettle, thistle and willow 
seedlings not filled with salvation 
but anesthetic relief.

Let clean catch and release follow
the weeping and gnashing of teeth.
Brown trout speckled, swimming, spawning
some new route to the river bottom.

In the pasture behind me where moonlight 
ends and the bull kept to service 
the cows begins
I will find a legitimate vocation.

I will mix a pallet of paint, capture
some scene—a line of clouds reflected
in the stream the moment they apply themselves
like sterile gauze against a gaping wound.

©2024 Jenna Rindo
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